Walden West failed to notify parents of employee’s sex crime 10 years ago

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Tie-dye t-shirts dry on the bushes in front of dormitories at Walden West Center in Saratoga, Calif., on Friday, June 19, 2015. (Jim Gensheimer/Bay Area News Group)

Ken Blackstone, Santa Clara County Office of Education director of media & communications, leads off a press conference at Walden West Center in Saratoga, Calif., on Friday, June 19, 2015. A task force to examine the policies and procedures of Walden West Science Camp was announced. (Jim Gensheimer/Bay Area News Group)

Walden West Lodge, which serves as a dining room and assembly area, is situated at the main entrance of Walden West Center in Saratoga, Calif., on Friday, June 19, 2015. The Sobrato family was a major donor to fund construction of the building. (Jim Gensheimer/Bay Area News Group)

Ten years before a popular Walden West camp employee was arrested on suspicion of child molestation and child pornography, another live-in employee was charged with — and sentenced for — molesting a child he met online.

While the June 2005 arrest of Steven Michael Dolan could have served as an alarm and catalyst to beef up safeguards, an investigation by this newspaper has found the camp run by the Santa Clara County Office of Education neglected to notify parents at the time or take significant steps to change its policies to better protect children.

The troubling story behind Dolan’s abrupt departure from Walden West had never been publicized until now. Sources tipped off the newspaper about Dolan in the aftermath of the camp’s questionable handling of the May arrest of another employee, Edgar Covarrubias-Padilla. Dolan’s arrest was apparently kept so secret at the time that then-county board of education members said they had never heard about the sensitive case.

Colleen Wilcox, who was superintendent at the time, also said she had no recollection of the case.

Dolan, then 21 and a lifeguard and recreation assistant who lived in an apartment at the camp, was immediately dismissed and sent packing a day after he was caught in his car at Cañada College in Redwood City with a naked 14-year-old boy he met online.

Since the boy was not a camper, the county Office of Education presumed “this occurred in his (Dolan’s) private life outside the work environment,” spokesman Tom DeLapp said. Therefore, he said, the office did not investigate whether Dolan may have victimized any Walden West campers. Nor did it review safety measures at its Saratoga and Cupertino outdoor-education camps, or how to improve them.

Instead, court records show, the same camp director who is now on paid leave for lying in this year’s investigation of Covarrubias-Padilla testified in 2006 on behalf of Dolan, who ended up serving eight months in jail.

“Someone who abuses children is not likely to abuse only one,” said Gareth Hedges of The Redwoods Group, a North Carolina-based insurance and risk-management group for organizations like the YMCA and Boys and Girls Clubs.

As it turned out, just two years later Dolan was again arrested after being found in his car with alcohol and a boy, both in violation of his probation. In 2012, he was convicted of molesting a young relative over a four-year period — the same time, 2001 to 2005, when he worked at Walden West.

Reached by phone, Dolan, who lives in Santa Clara, said, “I’d rather not speak to you.”

Now, looking back, experts and outraged parents of Walden West campers say the Office of Education’s inaction may have fostered an environment that left campers vulnerable.

“It makes me sick that these people can conduct business as usual with little consequence and without being held accountable for their policies,” said Mayella Gardea of San Jose, whose son attended the camp last fall.

While schools and outdoor camps attract adults who love to teach, they also are magnets for child predators, child advocates say. After a child molestation allegation, Hedges said, organizations should communicate with families of other children who may have been in contact with the accused employee.

“You send a letter to parents that an allegation has been made,” Hedges said, and offer to help those with suspicions to get in touch with police and find appropriate care for their child — even if the arrest doesn’t involve campers.

But 10 years ago, the county Office of Education didn’t tell campers’ families or even most of its own staff of the arrest. Whether that was adequate isn’t something current leaders, who joined the office in recent years, want to judge. “I think we can’t speak for what we would have done at the time,” DeLapp said.

Hedges’ firm recommends a slew of practices to protect children, such as an absolute ban on adults being alone with a child, contacting campers outside camp, photographing them on personal devices, or even tickling and wrestling. “You don’t catch abusers abusing,” he said. “You catch them breaking the rules.”

Such rules either weren’t put in place or weren’t enforced at Walden West after Dolan’s arrest. Instead, one former teacher said, “Steve just disappeared, and we didn’t tell students why.”

What went on then at the camp is difficult to discern. Current Superintendent Jon Gundry, who took office last August, had not heard of the Dolan incident until contacted by this newspaper. Combing through records and questioning employees, he said he found little. “People who were here,” he said, “seem to have some institutional amnesia.”

Philip Gordillo, then director of classified employee services and who was copied on Dolan’s letter of dismissal, said through an Office of Education spokesman that he did not know Dolan was arrested for child molestation.

But Walden West Director Anita Parsons — whom Gundry placed on paid leave earlier this year for lying to him about Covarrubias-Padilla having no contact with children — appears to have stood behind Dolan. Court documents show she testified on his behalf at his first sentencing in February 2006.

Like Covarrubias-Padilla, Dolan was hired as a substitute and given various jobs such as lifeguard and teaching assistant over several years, starting when he was a teenager. He passed a background check — although he noted on his application that he had a prior juvenile conviction for assault. After Dolan was caught with a boy he met online, a former Walden West employee recalled deputies swept through the Saratoga campus, confiscating computers. It isn’t clear whether sheriff’s investigators questioned campers or employees about Dolan, because San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Rebecca Rosenblatt said the detective in charge of the case has retired — and the agency refused to allow the newspaper to review the case file.

Access to the Internet didn’t change after his arrest, the Office of Education conceded. While the office has had content filters on its Internet access, they are less restrictive for camp employees than for students. And the filters don’t block file-sharing applications that years later Covarrubias-Padilla allegedly used to download child pornography.

Walden West didn’t begin fingerprinting adult volunteers until 2011. It didn’t train its campers in age-appropriate self-protection skills. It didn’t screen or substantially train teen volunteers, who were left in charge of campers at night. And it didn’t write down rules on contact with campers.

Those omissions don’t follow best practices recommended by Praesidium, a child-abuse risk-management group. “You want to make sure to have right-on training, in how to recognize inappropriate interaction between children or between children and adults,” its president and CEO, Richard Dangel, said.

Walden West manuals discuss camper misbehavior, games, cabin cheers and showering rules. Teen leaders were permitted to leave their cabins to gather in the Hub after hours if they thought their campers were all asleep. But the manual mentions nothing about appropriate volunteer behavior, how to talk to homesick kids, report staff misbehavior or look for signs of child abuse.

Now, after the latest arrest, the Office of Education is taking action. It has named a 20-member task force to investigate safety measures at Walden West. But the office still insists the camp meets and exceeds recommended safety standards. And DeLapp emphasized, when the task force was announced, that the incident involving Covarrubias-Padilla was the first case of alleged criminal conduct of any kind at the camp.

Mindy Dirks, of Monte Sereno, who questioned the supervision at Walden West after her son visited three years ago, said Dolan’s arrest should have served as a “a wake-up call” for the camp to do everything possible to protect children.

“I think they have a mission to spread the joy of science” to all students, she said, “and they don’t want to let anything stand in the way.”

Sharon Noguchi covers preschool through high school for the Bay Area News Group. She's written about teen stress, high-school cheating, Common Core and teacher tenure. She also runs workshops aimed at developing high school journalists.

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